Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Once upon a time many national cultures were hat-wearing
cultures. Everyone, or nearly everyone, wore them, and they wore them every day,
not just for funerals and weddings. Kids wore them to school, or when out
delivering newspapers; grownups wore them to work and to church, or just to go
and fetch some groceries. For men and women a hat denoted a world of class,
inflected by gender, ethnicity, age, region and eccentric preferences. Some
jobs were signalled immediately by the choice of hat (butcher or bookie, for
instance). But it was a dangerous thing simply to assume you knew where a
person sat in the social hierarchy just because of the hat that they wore. And
of course it wasn’t just the choice of hat that was important, it was also the
way you wore it. When hat-wearing died out what was lost was a smorgasbord of
micro-gestures: hat tilting, hat tipping, hat hanging, and a range of jaunty
and not so jaunty angles. It is hard to imagine the Hollywood worlds of Film Noir
without hats, or comedies like His Girl
Friday as a hatless movie. Song and dance numbers needed hats the way that
tap-dancing required special shoes.

How did hat
wearing die out? When did hat wearing begin to mark you out as an eccentric or
as old-fashioned or as an extravert? Presumably it was gradual, the cultural
work of a generation. Presumably a young generation of adult males (or mainly
males) entering the workplace started to stop wearing hats as they sought to differentiate
themselves from an older generation of hat wearers. Or perhaps casualization meant
that it just began to become noticeable when young people were wearing hats as
if they were trying to be old before their time. School teachers at more
progressive schools probably started to jettison the school cap or hat as an
affectation of more disciplinarian schools. Gradually hat wearing would seem
old-fashioned. But as hat wearing stopped being a ubiquitous part of everyday
life hat-based sayings simply carried on unperturbed. People still keep things
under their hat even if they have no hat to keep things under; urban nomads
might continue to say ‘wherever I lay my hat that’s my home’ even if they are
dogmatically hatless.

Many hats
had a practical purpose of protecting the head from the cold and the wind, from
rain and snow, or shadowing the eyes from strong sunlight. But there was also
something of a lived metaphorics about hat wearing. To put a hat on your head
when leaving home in the morning was like putting a roof on your head: it
suggested the continuation of a domestic, private space that could continue within
the public realm. Peaks and brims worked like awnings and vestibules to suggest
a semi-private space. Today we negotiate the private dimensions of public space
with earphones and smartphones. But hat culture was always much more permeable
and nuanced. Sure you could pull your hat down as a ‘do not disturb sign’, but
you could also tip it up a notch to suggest a friendly openness to
communication.

Is there anything more intimate
than the idea of two be-hatted people kissing?

Friday, 12 June 2015

Charles Saatchi’s first ‘public’ gallery was in London’s St
John’s Wood and opened in the 1980s in an old paint factory, not too far away
from Sigmund Freud’s final home. You couldn’t have hoped for a more telling symptom
of the times. Here was the advertising guru who had helped Margaret Thatcher
(with her espousal of a return to Victorian values) get into power, and here he
was collecting and curating avant-garde art. It was like watching epochal change
on fast-forward. The old factory that once manufactured paint for industrial
and domestic use, produced for painting walls and ceilings, was now being repurposed
so that visitors could look at paint in a very different form, and one that was
way out of the price range of ninety-nice percent of the visitors.

The first
time that I visited the Saatchi Gallery was for a press opening that I had
somehow managed to wangle an invite for (perhaps I intended to write something
about the exhibition of American art that was on show). The floor and the walls
had all been newly painted with heavy-duty white emulsion. I had been to white
cube galleries before, but none that took it quite so literally and none that
realised the de-materialising space so completely. At one point in the gallery
there was a step between two levels of the gallery. It was almost impossible to
see and you would watch journalists regularly tripping over it as they tried to
balance canapés and notepads while negotiating this invisible obstacle. The
step was a little touch of the real in a space that seemed to have lost all
contact with the ground, or with any sense of place or reality.

It must
have been my second visit that I saw and experienced Richard Wilson’s
installation 20: 50. The artwork is a room that you enter via a walkway that
feels as if it is carved into a solid dark mirror made of oil that completely
covers the rest of the room. Wilson’s installation must be the most perfectly
realised site-specific artwork for the Saatchi experience: even though the
gallery has changed premises a number of times, this work is perfectly suited
to the Saatchi ethos. It offers both an immediate embodiment of the Saatchi
world – a de-realised space of reflective surface made out of that number one
commodity, oil – and an imminent critique of that very same world. This is an
art work that un-grounds you while making you dirty. The reflective surface is
so perfect, so unworldly, that people can’t help themselves they have to touch
the mirroring material. And here is the second touch of the real. What looked
sleek and impenetrable turns out to be used sump oil that immediately ruins
clothes and saturates skin. There is a legal warning from the Saatchi Gallery
that accompanies the exhibit. Should you dirty yourself then Saatchi is not
legally responsible for your dry cleaning bill.

Thursday, 11 June 2015

For a while I lived in the London ‘village’ of Barnes. It’s
just over the river from Hammersmith and is favoured by media types and artists
of a certain age (it has become far too expensive for the younger brand of
bohemians). I had a very cheap room there as my friend ran the fish shop in the
High Street. Sometimes in the morning I would find purple and blue lobsters
lumbering around with thick elastic bands around their pincers. (I would see
them again later, inert, and a livid orangey-pink.) In one of the residential
streets I noticed a blue plaque telling me that Kurt Schwitters had once lived
in the area.

It was in
Barnes that the pop star Marc Bolan had died. His Mini had crashed into a tree on
the bend of a road. I can remember when he died. Or at least I think I did
until I looked it up on the internet and found that he died in 1977, when I was
16. In my memory I was about ten or eleven and one of the teachers at school
told us. I remember how he rushed into the classroom visibly upset and told us
that Bolan was in hospital and it looked like he was going to die. This can’t
have happened as I was at a different school in 1977.

Bolan was for me the iconic pop star of the 1970s. With satin
trousers and tousled hair Bolan was the one and only electric warrior. Well
perhaps not the only electric warrior: there was always Micky Finn to contend
with – the mysterious bongo player who cast an eerie shadow over T-Rex. What
was he doing? Who needed a bongo player when you had a drummer? Perhaps he was
there for the parties, the glamour; perhaps he was Bolan’s minder or his
dealer?

When I was
in Barnes I visited the site of Bolan’s crash. I knew it was a site of
pilgrimage for his fans and that a shrine had built up over the years, with
keepsakes, letters and ribbons festooning the very tree that had killed him.
Like lots of things in life it was a good deal grubbier than I had imagined it.
The purple ribbons had frayed and turned the colour of wet concrete. The
letters had become unreadable after the predictably unpredictable English
weather had had its way with them. I wasn’t sure what looked worse: the
thoroughly dead flowers or the plastic ones whose unnaturally bright colour was
fading as it absorbed the colour of exhaust fumes.

Where I live now I always pass a
roadside memorial on my way to the train station. It must have been there for
about ten years. The flowers and cards are replenished once or perhaps twice a
year (on the anniversary of the crash, and perhaps the birthday of the
deceased, would be my guess). It is formed around the metal post of a road
sign. There is little that is more dispiriting that the sight of dead flowers
stained with car fumes. The flowers and cards are taped to the post with parcel
tape. This year there is a new addition. At the bottom someone had taped (using
the same tape) an open can of cider. Perhaps it was the favourite tipple of the
person being memorialised. Perhaps a drunk driver had caused the crash and this
was a way of marking that fact clear. It reminded me of a wreath that had been
fashioned to look like a giant cigarette (it is included in Jeremy Deller’s
Folk Archive). The wreath memorialised the deceased’s deep love of cigarettes,
a love that for some is also a death sentence.

Sunday, 7 June 2015

In some distant time, when the treasured items of industrial
modernity will have been disinterred from the ruins of the Anthropocene, there
will be some questions about what to make of those rectangles of paint on
canvas to be found in museums across the world. What could be said, for instance,
about those rectangles where the paint is arranged in patterns of line and
areas of colour that don’t seem to refer to anything out there in the world (or
out there in a world that once existed)? How would an archaeologist specialising
in earth-history square the idea that these highly worked surfaces were
produced at the same time as the world was producing global communication
systems, pursuing space investigation, and developing human organ transplants?
Would they be seen as cultic residues from a previous age – some weird,
untimely practice with mystical associations? And how would this fit with the incredible
monetary value that had been attached to some of these rectangles, or the
critical evaluations that had declared these works as ‘cutting edge’, ‘progressive’,
and so on?

Perhaps the
producers of these paintings will be seen as mystics, shamans, weavers of magic
spells? Or, more reasonably, as people who spent their lives experimenting with
colours, space, tone, light and line, as a way of investigating nature, of
cultivating an attention towards the perceptual world. From the other side of
the Anthropocene such practices will be greeted with some sympathy if they can
be understood as attempts to investigate nature but without the added ambition
of then being able to exploit it for financial gain. The impetus to investigate
colour, for instance, might well be seen as close to the metallurgists working to
produce new alloys, but without the same potential impact on the earth. These
coloured rectangles would perhaps be seen as non-instrumental experiments that
refuse the ambition of wanting to master nature.

Yet the
world of instrumental reason is vindictive. As a planetary force it is
spiteful. Here it casts a veil of ludicrous inflated financial worth over these
sensorial experiments. To stop us seeing them, it renders them opaque by equating
them with the bombastic lustre of the commodity form. It is hard to see a
painting of squiggles and blotches when it comes with a price tag in the tens
of millions of dollars; it is hard to see it as a project to engage with when
it is locked up in the massive jewellery stores that go by the name of National
Galleries. An alternative reality would have liberated them, sent them out to
grace the walls of primary schools, hospitals, and community centres. In this
reality painting abstract paintings would have been seen as a noble pursuit:
like keeping an allotment or learning the ukulele or designing a school.

Saturday, 28 March 2015

I’m sure I had been to parties before – kids’ parties, with
games and jelly and ice cream – that sort of thing. But this was the first
party I can actually remember, and the reason I remember it so clearly was
because it was a kids’ party which was pretending not to be one. I’m not sure
what, exactly, it was trying to be: perhaps something like a child’s idea of
how a bunch of fifteen year olds or sixteen year olds might party? Or perhaps,
more precisely, a twelve year old’s idea of how a sixteen year old who was
imagining a twenty-four year old partying, might party. I was nine at the time,
and one of the younger ones. The year was 1970 and on the turn-table that night
were the current picks of the pops – Bobby Bloom’s Montego Bay and Three Dog Night’s Mamma Told Me (Not to Come) – these at any rate were the songs I
can remember.

I can’t imagine that there were
many people at the party: ten, fifteen at the most. It was at a friend’s house
and their parents were out. The party was just the neighbourhood children:
brothers and sisters between the ages of about eight and twelve. We were
tooled-up to party with our treasured collection of seven inch singles, with
bottles of cherryade and R Whites lemonade, and with oodles of crisps. The record
player was a hulking great teak cabinet with valves. You could stack five or
six records at a time, though the more you stacked the looser the traction was:
you often ended up with your final single sounding as if it was being dragged, wobbling,
down in pitch by half an octave.

What I remember most was the
lighting. It felt like a very different kind of party because the lights were turned
down so low. Low lighting in an era where bright electrical lighting was easily
achieved felt ludicrously debauched. If you didn’t have a dimmer switch you
turned off the main light and obscured the brightness from a side light. If you
were particularly groovy you might have a coloured lightbulb (red or blue) for
the ambient light. Total darkness was always a possibility, but given the
amount of crisps and the staining potential of the cherryade who would want to
risk it? We did of course.

The Montego Bay single was a great favourite and had one of those
sing-a-long choruses which didn’t entail having to learn any actual words just
oohs (like the much loved Na Na Hey Hey
Goodbye by Steam, and later covered by Bananarama). But it was the Three
Dog Night song (which was a cover of a song penned by Randy Newman) that set
the aspirational bar for that night and for any party since. Mamma Told Me (Not to Come) was like an
obscure lesson in partying the bohemian way. It gave you no clear information
about how to achieve the requisite level of partying, but gave you an
exceptionally clear indication of what the desired outcome was: ‘This is the
craziest party / That could ever be / Don't turn on the lights / 'Cause I
don't wanna see’. What sort of a party could this be? So wild that it would
terrify you to behold what was going on?

We were young and I have no
recollection of seeing anyone snogging or even close dancing. But it was dark.
I can imagine the terror for any adult who turned the lights on: children dancing
by grinding potato crisps into the shag-pile. Oh the horror.

Monday, 23 March 2015

Like many children in the 1960s, I collected stamps. It was
a relatively cheap hobby and there was always the possibility that one day your
collection could be a treasure trove of rare gems. I still have my album and it
is filled with Hungarian stamps (Magyar Posta) commemorating the 1960 Olympic games
in Rome, butterflies, and Jurij Gagarin’s space flight; Polish stamps (Polska)
commemorating the 1964 Tokyo games, the Grenoble winter games of 1968, and
gliders; and Czechoslovakian stamps (Československo)
commemorating Gagarin, flowers and birds. I guess I bought the stamps as
pick-and-mix bags from the local newsagent. I can’t imagine that the good
people of the village where I lived were in regular correspondence with their comrades
behind the iron curtain and were passing their exotic stamps on to me.

During my brief term as a
miniature philatelist there was one suite of stamps I particularly liked. This was
the British Post Office’s 1971 collection of ‘Modern University Buildings’, featuring
buildings from the universities of Southampton, Essex, Leicester and
Aberystwyth. To my mind they have the same register and tone as the stamps from
Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia – they welcome the future with open arms.
And, little known to me at the time, it was my future they were welcoming: I
spent too many chaotic nights as a teenager in the student union at Essex
University ‘partying’ to Iggy Pop, Roy Harper, the Psychedelic Furs (and so on)
– not as a university student (I was at the local FE College).

There is something perfect about
a stamp: it is a form of money, yet it has only one particular task to perform –
the task of transport. For a while the post office used to sell large-scale
versions of their stamps as postcards. The postcards even had crinkle cut edges
like the real thing. I wished that these postcards didn’t also require an additional
stamp for postage, but they did. It never seemed to be possible that you could
send the stamp postcard with an identical postage stamp on the back.

Sunday, 22 March 2015

When the headache-coloured skies of winter descend, the
ubiquitous advertising hoardings and illuminated shop fronts take on a new
role. Giant backlit transparencies, neon signage or electronic screens punch holes
in the drab, proximate environment. Amidst the sleety drizzle and along the
wind-whipped pavements, you find sun-blushed, luminous visions that mock the
dull muddy greys that fashion the neighbourhood. Through the general hangover
darkness of mid-afternoon, you glimpse the gleaming Mediterranean blues of
Davidoff Water (and Davidoff eyes); through the dank curtain of another
overcast Wednesday you catch sight of Colgate’s smile, Nivea’s pout, and L’Oréal’s
self-satisfied grin.

In the 1980s I was taught that
this world of advertising needed decoding. Advertising was a text that smuggled
in ideologies of a certain kind of life while flogging you unnecessary
luxuries. But in many respects the dream-world of advertising is an easy one to
interpret: buy this and become attractive; make people envy you by having a
fitted-kitchen made out of floating minimalism. And it is easy to recognise
that the world fashioned from advertising is made out of impossible bodies,
improbably at ease with themselves and each other, living in environments
untouched by the worldly forces of decay, disease, poverty, or even something
as ordinary as rough, lined, mottled skin. All you have to do, after all, is to
look out of the window of the bus and compare the ad-world and the ad-people
with you and your fellow passengers. Perhaps rather than decode advertising we
just need to see the scale of it. How could you do this? Perhaps some multi-billionaire
will buy all the advertising space of a entire city, and all the advertising slots on
broadcast media, all the algorithmic adverts on the internet and replace them all
with one image: of fire, burning, consuming, crackling...

Rather than interpreting adverts
I think I want to return to Raymond William’s 1960s notion of advertising as a
magic system, conjuring illusions through misdirection and sleight-of-hand. To
get some grip on advertising requires less attention to its manifest and latent
contents, and more attention to its phenomenal forms: the way it chases you down
as you waft across the internet; the way its impossible images belittle real
affection; the way its grammars of value inveigles ordinary talk. It’s a bonanza
and everything must go.

Saturday, 14 March 2015

Freud, in his big book of dreams, claims that the grammar of
dreams is a negotiation of the past and the future pressed through the
preoccupations and happenstance of the present. A dream, for Freud, roughly
follows patterns inherited from the past, driven by a wish for the future (that
the dream might fulfil in some way), thrown together with what Freud calls the
day’s residues (the remains of the day). You can see the truth of some of this
when you work out that this or that bit of your dream is borrowed from last
night’s barely registered television watching.

More and
more I think of the patterns of the past taking the form of distinctive
cartographies. Over and over I’m locked into an oneiric commute, or else I’m
having to deal with situations within a particular house. The trouble with
these commutes and with the dream houses I occupy is that are determinedly impossible
and unmanageable (or rather they follow their own dream logic). One of my dream
commutes has me having to catch a bus ‘home’. I’m late of course and the last
bus will be leaving soon. I know where the bus stop is, and all I have to do is
go to that bit of town and catch the bus. The only trouble is that the dream
confuses me as to where I am. I know the part of town precisely: it is a street
that starts wide and gets narrower as it moves away from the centre of town; it
has some shops (for instance a large furniture shop that is sometimes a musical
instrument shop or a sweet shop), and the street gives way to more and more domestic
houses, some very old, as the street narrows. It is not a salubrious part of
town: perhaps students live here; perhaps some of the houses are used by
small-time lawyers and insurance companies. I need to go either east or west
but my sense of direction and my sense of the route I need to take is based on
a quite different urban landscape. It’s as if I’m trying to find my way around Berlin
using a map of Paris (an old Situationist ploy): or to get more of a sense of
the regional scale of these dreams – it’s as if I’m trying to find my way
around Colchester in Essex with a map of some other small regional town.

The houses
that I inhabit in dreams all seem very familiar. Perhaps an amalgam of houses
that I lived in my twenties when I moved house a couple of times a year. The
houses have too many rooms and there is always a room that throws the logic of
the house out of joint: for instance a small terraced house might have a small
container ship as part of the basement. The container ship might be small (for
a container ship) but it is gargantuan compared to the scale of the house. [I
get excited thinking that one of the containers would make a good studio.]

My dreams
are made up of the edges of things: the edges of town; the corridors between
rooms; the patch of packed earth near a small copse on the edge of a
playground. Whatever there is at the centre is of no concern of mine.

Wednesday, 11 February 2015

I’m not alone, I wouldn’t
imagine, in being drawn to the technical vocabularies of others. I’m especially
drawn to words and phrases that are part of ordinary language (rather than the
Greek-Latin nomenclature of medicine or horticulture), especially when those
phrases seem to bring a ritualistic element with them. ‘Topping Out’ and
‘Breaking Ground’ conjure up, for me, magical achievements, the slaying of fearsome
beasts. I’ve watched too many Grand
Designs on TV, perhaps. Even phrases like ‘second fix’ suggest tasks of
great magnitude. I think that the fascination with such a language comes from an
unformed daydream of being someone who uses such terms, habitually. It is the
same with the Shipping Forecast: what would it be like to have a close
knowledge of ‘squally showers in Fitzroy, Lundy, Fastnet’, to have an immediate
grasp of a phrase like ‘occasionally moderate later’?

Recently I
learnt a new word – the going. It names the ‘throw’ of a ladder, the distance
on the ground between where you place the base of the ladder and the base of
the vertical wall that you are leaning it against. It names the length of a
step in a staircase. It is a perfect word, and one filled with existential overtones.
It seems to describe a world with an indifference to plummeting depths and
vertiginous heights. What matters is the going: the forward motion that would
take place even if you had to retrace your steps. There is no going back, there
is just going. The going. It seems to tie time to movement as an inexorable
law: now and until you leave this world you will be going. It sets us all on a
horizontal plane of time and movement, where all we can do is go on. Until that
is we don’t. And it, turns out, that not going on is also the going, the
ultimate going.

‘The Going’
was the name of the first poem that Thomas Hardy wrote after the death of his
wife Emma. They had been estranged for some time and it seems that Thomas Hardy
had made Emma Hardy’s life fairly miserable in her final years. He hadn’t
seemed to notice how ill she had become. In the poem Hardy describes his wife’s
death as ‘your great going’ and ‘your vanishing’. The keep on keeping on is the
going, but so too is the stopping. In both its technical sense as a measurement of
horizontal distance for technologies that traverse heights (ladders and stairs)
and its vernacular sense of the moving along, of leaving, it seems to describe
the great incessant onwardness of life. We like to know that we are going-on
but not necessarily where we are heading in our ultimate going.

Wednesday, 4 February 2015

For a while, some years ago, I used to like to photograph
the informal tracks that were made across common ground. These tracks marked
the ground with diagrams of trajectories taken, of veerings veered and short
cuts cut. Repeated footfall had rubbed the grass bare and indented the earth
below. The areas that I was most drawn to were the anonymous scrubs of land
that people used for walking dogs, or were used as a quick back route between
houses and bus-stop, or were used by kids to conduct their non-digital
encounters (to drink non-digital booze and smoke non-digital joints). These
tended to be untended landscapes. What the surrealists used to call terrain vague – vacant lots, no-man’s
land, a landscape of the vague. Because such places were untended these
improvised tracks used to ‘take’ better there than they would if they had been
in front of a cathedral or in a well-kept park. But even in such over-tended
places tracks of bare earth appear, cutting lines through neatly trimmed lawns.

The sculptor Carl Andre (famous
to most Britons over the age of 40 as the artist behind the ‘bricks’) was once
given a commission by a museum to make a public sculptor. He decided to produce
a sculpted path that people could use to use to walk across a new patch of
parkland in front of the museum. But he decided that he wouldn’t impose his own
route; he would let common usage choose it for him. So he had the patch of land
seeded and waited for the grass to grow. Then the grass was cut and the patch
of land became just another part of the museum’s grounds. And Andre waited. And
sure enough a track began to emerge of people who cut across the grass instead
of following the official walkways around the lawn. So Andre used this track
and placed his path there. It was a collective effort. Some months later other
lines began to appear that veered away from Andre’s path. These were new short
cuts, slightly longer than the short cut that Andre had used.

People don’t stick to the path.
And why should they? I learnt recently that urban planners and their ilk call
these improvised and collective paths ‘lines of desire’. As if collective
desire had found its expression in these desultory pathways, as if our desire
for more satisfying lives had found its satisfaction in marking-out a
trajectory of barren earth.

Hello

I teach cultural studies at the University of Sussex in England. I have written a few academic books - most recently A Passion for Cultural Studies and Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. My first non-academic book was published with Profile. It came out in January 2014 and is called The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House.